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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

#1964: Stephen McDowell & Mark Beliles

You may not have heard of them, but Stephen
McDowell and Mark Beliles are two of the scariest people alive in the US today,
and – at least arguably – vastly more influential than you’d ever expect unless
you had intimate knowledge of the inner circles of those powerful, wealthy,
tireless and frighteningly big American Dominionist groups that make the Taliban look like defenders of reason, freedom and
tolerance – this, despite the fact that McDowell and Beliles so abjectly
delusional that we wouldn’t trust them to add the numbers two and four together
without injuring themselves.

McDowell and Beliles are, for instance, the
authors of the (apparently) popular homeschooling textbook America’s Providential History, which outlines the Seven Mountains strategy,
combines the legalistic fire-and-brimstone Biblical framework of the
Reconstructionists with the zeal of the New Apostolic Reformation,
and provides a list of “Christ Guidelines
for Resistance to Tyranny” with the explicit warning that there “may come a time when we must resist lawful
tyranny.” Basically, the book espouses the thoroughly paranoid,
conspiracy-theory-fuelled anti-government sentiment familiar from today’s extreme
wingnuttery, but fueled by religious, Satanic Panic-style fervor.

A recurring theme of the book (described in
more detail here and here)
is that the whole notion of scarcity of
resources is a communist myth, and that any shortage is due simply to
people not having sufficient faith: “A
secular society will lack faith in God's providence and consequently men will
find fewer natural resources ... The secular or socialist has a limited
resource mentality […] In contrast, the Christian knows that the potential in
God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's
earth.The resource are waiting to be
tapped." This is clearly borne out by the data, which demonstrates
that the poverty of a region is inversely correlated with its inhabitants
levels of faith; history is for instance clear about what happens to your crops
when you neglect to make the proper sacrifices –just look at the Aztecs; they
got the point. And “[w]hile many
secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made
the earth sufficiently large, with plenty of resources to accommodate all the
people He knew would come into existence. […] All the five billion people on
the earth could live in the state of Texas in single family homes with front
and back yards and be fed by production in the rest of the United States.
Present world agriculture areas, if developed by present technology, could feed
31 billion people.” And if you wonder on what data their conclusion is
based, it just shows your lack of faith. The thing is, of course, that the data
the rest of us are currently using are collected by secular, and therefore
don’t correct for the inherent laziness of secularists: “Those with a secular world-view will lack a God-inspired strength and
work ethic.” In fact, it’s not only a matter of effort: “In a Christian economy people will earn more
with less work,” which means, for instance, that crime will disappear and
people will start to respect the Ten Commandments. And the most important
measure to take to reach this situation, is to abolish Government in favor of Christian control of the economy.

Their chapter on the Civil War and
Reconstruction also gives a useful illustration of some contemporary wingnuts’
view of the Confederacy (more on that here).
In fact, it is primarily concerned with the religious revival they think they can
find among the Conferedate Army (“While
the Confederate Army was enjoying revival (up to 150,000 Southern troops were
saved during the war), it also enjoyed phenomenal success in almost every major
battle”) and detailing the admirable religious faith of the Confederacy’s
heroic generals. The Reconstruction era, meanwhile, is described as an unholy
attack on Christianity: “After the war an
ungodly radical Republican element gained control of the Congress. They wanted
to centralize power and shape the nation according to their philosophy. […]
They used their post-war control of Congress to reconstruct the South, pass the
Fourteenth Amendment, and in many ways accomplish their goals.” Then McDowell
and Beliles go on to criticize the evil of the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments
and suggest that separation of church and state was a consequence of the more
godly South being defeated. As for slavery, McDowell does elsewhere (on the
Wallbuilders website, in fact) describes slavery as “America’s
original sin,” but then states that “In
light of the Scriptures we cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general
sense, is sin.” Jesus means you
can have it both ways.

Along the way, they also repeat plenty of
religious fundamentalist myths about American history, such as the Aitken Bible myth.

Their chapter “The American Apostasy and
Decline” claims that the decline of America is due to the abdication of
authority by Christians to the “conspiracies
of men,” which includes “the
humanists, the ACLU, the big bankers, the Trilateral Commission, the New Age Movement, the World Council
of Churches, the Homosexuals, the Feminists, the Communists, the Democrats, the
Pope, etc.”

McDowell and Beliles are also the founders
of the Providence Foundation, an organization seeking to “disciple the seven areas of culture.”
The foundation’s “National Transformation Network” also offers courses by Paul Jehle and David Barton.
McDowell and Beliles themselves have conducted training in dominion-style
politics since the 1980s, including courses on “biblical economics”,
which is basically Ayn Rand-style economic theory founded on judiciously
selected quotes from the Old Testament. Much of their activities have taken
place abroad, and they have accordingly also written an international textbook,
Liberating the Nations. It’s pretty
scary stuff.

Many of their strategies and ideas were
apparently developed during their association with the militant fundamentalist
group Maranatha Campus Ministries in the 1980s.

Diagnosis: Deranged madmen, utterly and
completely out of touch with anything resembling reality or accuracy, and as
evil as they are delusional. But they’ve also enjoyed more than their share of
influence. Dangerous.